'Dammit, this guy is cool'

Benicio Del Toro has been fascinated by Che Guevara, ever since hearing his name in a Rolling Stones song. Now he's playing him in a two-part biopic. He talks to Simon Hattenstone about cigars, socialism and being the best mumbler in Hollywood

'By the end of a Monday, I felt it was Friday' ... Benicio Del Toro in Che

'Dammit, this guy is cool'

Benicio Del Toro has been fascinated by Che Guevara, ever since hearing his name in a Rolling Stones song. Now he's playing him in a two-part biopic. He talks to Simon Hattenstone about cigars, socialism and being the best mumbler in Hollywood

Friday 28 November 2008 19.01 EST
First published on Friday 28 November 2008 19.01 EST

Benicio Del Toro is Hollywood's finest mumbler since Marlon Brando. He is never better than when mumbling his lines. Except, possibly, when he has no lines to mumble at all. He loves nothing more than paring a script down to nothing. No one can grunt, wince or wheeze their way through a movie quite like Del Toro.

Which makes his new film, Che, the perfect vehicle for him. In the movie, to be released in two parts (The Argentine and Guerrilla), Del Toro's Che Guevara grunts through five hours of action. This is a walking, rarely talking, gun-toting revolutionary wheeze machine. His performance makes Che in turn one of the most boring and most captivating films I have seen.

Politician, writer, traveller, biker, doctor, guerrilla and poster boy: few people have a more fascinating story than Guevara. But director Steven Soderbergh and Del Toro as good as refuse to tell it. There is hardly any narrative - we simply watch him hacking his way through the jungles of Cuba in part one and Bolivia in part two. It is a sublimely contrary piece of film-making. Only in the last minute does Soderbergh even attempt to humanise his protagonist as he reveals that he has left his four children at home. Hollywood trade paper Variety said Guerrilla had all the excitement of a military training documentary. And yet such is the physicality of Del Toro's performance, the way he inhabits Guevara, that you can't take your eyes off him.

Del Toro, who co-produced Che, is taller than I expect. Despite being 6ft 2in, he has a habit of hunching into roles. He's wearing a Molson Light cap, trainers, jeans, jacket, slightly stained top. He is unshaven, his eyes are heavily lidded, and he looks like the world's sexiest hobo. He wears an outsized silver ring with a face resembling the Grim Reaper carved into it. "Everybody likes looking at it and talking about it," he says. "Especially the girls."

He talks slowly, deliberately, as if the slower he talks, the less he need say. He chews on a big fat Havana and laughs like the famous Latin-American dance - "Cha-cha-cha." He twiddles the cigar in his fingers, lights it, puffs on it and gives me a potted history of his smoking. He is at his most congenial and relaxed when talking about nothing. "The life expectancy of a cigar is, what, two days? Right. So you can't step outside a freaking restaurant to smoke with everyone that smokes. Cos they are halfway through the cigarette while I'm lighting this thing. Cha-cha-cha!" He marvels at the smoke as it dances through the air. "This is the way it was intended for us to smoke. The cigarette was made for women as a type of smaller, skinny thing. This is to taste - and to really smell it."

Del Toro was fascinated with Che Guevara from the first time he heard his name mentioned in the Rolling Stones song Indian Girl, on the album Emotional Rescue. ("Mr Gringo, my father he ain't no Che Guevara/And he's fighting the war on the streets of Masaya.") That was 1980, Del Toro was 13 years old, and he wondered why he'd never heard much about Guevara - hardly anything when a little boy in Puerto Rico, and even less when he moved with his family to Pennsylvania in the US. Of course he found himself fascinated by Ernesto Che Guevara - he loved the Stones, and Emotional Rescue was the first album he'd bought. "I hear of this guy and he's got a cool name. Che Guevara!" Del Toro as good as swoons when he says it. And the appeal does seem as simple as that - groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics.

So Del Toro grew up, left school and went to drama school in New York. Soon enough, he got his first job, in the James Bond movie Licence To Kill. He found himself in Mexico City, with a bit part, and plenty of time on his hands. "So I went to a library and I was looking at books, and I came across a picture by René Burri of Che, smiling, in fatigues, I thought, 'Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!' "

Did he think he looked like Guevara? "Well, I thought he looked like a cousin of mine, so yeah, a little bit. There was a book of letters he wrote to his family, a collection, and when I started reading that thing, it was like the first time I read Jack Kerouac, you know? It was like this guy, he's my age, in his 20s, and he's writing like a poet. He was writing these great letters - funny, articulate, sarcastic, socially concerned. At some point he was even going to try out to be in movies in Mexico. He had an uncle who had a friend who produced movies, and he says maybe he'll try his luck in movies or TV." That was what appealed to him about Guevara more than anything - yes, he was an idealist, but he was also a chancer.

Guevara journeyed through Latin America in his 20s, and was politicised by the poverty he saw. Whereas the likes of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Gerry Adams in Northern Ireland eventually rejected the bullet for the ballot box, Guevara did the reverse. He served as minister of industry and president of the National Bank in Castro's Cuba, and travelled the world preaching Cuban socialism to world leaders, before deciding in 1965 that his true purpose was to incite revolution - first in Congo, then in Bolivia, where he was captured with the help of the CIA and executed.

It was the manner of Guevara's death that most appalled Del Toro - no trial, no defence, simply shot by the Bolivian army under instructions from the CIA. "He was killed like a war criminal, man, and he was not a war criminal. He should have been given a fair trial." He puffs on his cigar. "Ah oh! Here we go. Bring it on! Cha-cha-cha," he says, like a boxer psyching himself up before a fight. "It reminds me of a mafia hit, the way he was killed, because nobody wanted to take the blame. I think the fact that he was killed like that gave me a bit of extra drive to say, 'This story has to be told.' There was something about the way he was killed that really put the flame up my asssssss." He stretches the word ass to infinity. Close your eyes and you could have a young Jack Nicholson in front of you.

I ask if he considered himself political when he was growing up. "Nooooh... ppffh... nooooh... I wanted to be like the Stones and Springsteen and the Clash." But the Clash were punk's own Marxist guerrillas, weren't they? "Yeah, that's right. Washington Bullets." Del Toro certainly knows his political rock references. In the song Washington Bullets, the Clash refer to the US's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. ("Those Washington bullets want Castro dead/For Castro is the colour/That will earn you a spray of lead.") Del Toro cha-cha-cha's again before singing me a verse of Springsteen's Born In The USA, and laughs at how Ronald Reagan adopted it as an unofficial national anthem: "I got in a little hometown jam/And so they put a rifle in my hands/Sent me off to Vietnam/To go and kill the yellow man."

More often than not, directors have cast Del Toro as a character from the underclass or the margins - Latin-American trash. In the late 80s, he played mainly thugs and drug dealers on US television series, including Miami Vice. At 21, he became the youngest Bond villain. In The Usual Suspects, as wisecracking, fast-talking Fred Fenster, he took his mumbling to new extremes - brilliant but virtually incomprehensible. By the late 90s, he had put on three stone to play the gonzo journalist's coke-fuelled fiend of a friend in Hunter S Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. In 2000, he was wonderful as the Spanish-speaking Mexican border cop trying to stay on the straight and narrow in Soderbergh's Traffic, and won an Oscar for best supporting actor. In 2001, he was again nominated for an Oscar for his role in 21 Grams as a born-again Christian ex-druggie.

It all says more about Hollywood stereotyping (and, perhaps, the bags under his eyes) than his own background. In fact, Del Toro grew up in a middle-class, academic family. Both his parents were lawyers, though his mother died before she had time to practise at the bar. His older brother, Gustavo, is a paediatric oncologist in Manhattan.

I ask if it's true that the first time he was conscious of acting was when his mother was ill and he tried to cheer her up. "Yeah, probably."

"You knew she was dying?"

"Yeah."

He is shuffling uncomfortably in his seat, squishing his cap down on to his head.

"You never had the chance to tell her you wanted to be an actor?"

His eyes are getting bigger by the second. "I never need to. She's watching my movies. I hope."

"Were you a good boy?"

"Erm, no."

"Were you a bad boy?"

"Er, no. Just misunderstood. I don't know. You know Catcher In The Rye? In some ways he is the ultimate outsider in postwar American literature. There were elements of that... misunderstood... or, like, I wanted to say stuff but couldn't verbalise it."

Del Toro's father wanted him to follow him into law. Was he disappointed when he said he wanted to be an actor? "Yeah. Because it's probably one of the most difficult professions there is to make a living out of, and I agree with them now when I look back." He stops and half-smiles. "Are you the psychiatrist?" he asks.

His mother died from hepatitis when he was nine; at 13 the family moved to America and he was sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania. He started at the University of San Diego before dropping out of a business studies course and signing up to study theatre. From there he joined Stella Adler's acting studio and the Circle In The Square theatre school. He learned about the Method, and everything started to make sense. It wasn't simply "becoming your character", it was learning how to apply sensible doses of imagination and realism to your parts. "The bottom line in the Method is common sense, like if you want me to crash my car going 80 miles an hour, and walk out of the car and have a scene after where I'm just scratched, then I have to wear a seatbelt in the scene. If I don't wear a seatbelt, I'm going out of that window and I might not be able to do the next scene because I'll be, like, dead."

In Fear And Loathing, Del Toro morphed so believably into the obese, drug-crazed Dr Gonzo that he couldn't get another job for a couple of years. As well as putting on the weight, he burned himself on his arms with cigarette butts to get into character. Hunter S Thompson had warned him that the movie would screw up his career, and his words proved prophetic. "For a while I couldn't get a job in Hollywood after that movie came out." Why not? "I don't know. People thought I was a drunk, that I'd turned into a drunken, fat slob."

It's the difficult films that seem to mean most to him. And Che has been the most difficult. "You can't fuck with Che because you've got history there." It took him seven years to raise the money and get it made. Perhaps the surprising thing is that the money was raised at all - Che Guevara is not the most popular hero in America, after all, and this is a film that eschews narrative. Del Toro acts out the responses he received from potential backers. "'Yeah, but we love your acting! Yeah, we love your last movie!' It was tough." He grins as he recounts the problems. "One of the things that is difficult is a movie in Spanish. Pppghhhhhhhhffffw." He blows out his cheeks. So that was a bigger problem than the fact that it was about Che? "No, both were a problem, but one didn't help the other."

The diptych, as Soderbergh calls it, was shot over a mere 79 days. That was the only way Soderbergh could do it on a budget of $40m. "He was working me to a pulp and working himself to a pulp. It wasn't like the director was getting a steak dinner in his tent and then getting me to suffer. There were no seats on that set, and he was behind that camera." In one day, they started and finished five scenes, including one in which he beats up a mule and another in which he has an asthma attack mid-speech.

The end result is that Del Toro really does look as if he is suffering, at times slipping into madness, in an extremely hostile environment. Never more so than when he repeatedly punches the mule in the head. Were any animals hurt in the making of this film? "No... They have an amazing tolerance for pain because they get whipped and you need to use the whip to get them to move, so you hit them with your fist, and they look at you like you're a fly." He says it was draining. "By the end of a Monday, I felt it was Friday. I was physically out."

In 2004, another film was made about Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries. The two movies couldn't be more different, I say to Del Toro - the first was a Che-lite hippy-travelogue, while his take on it is the bloody story of a revolutionary trying to overthrow capitalism. He agrees, I think, but his answer is not terribly coherent. "Ssssshahahahha! Shove it in your face. Talk about Guantánamo! Say it really loud and clear - we want Guantánamo back!!! Uhm... yeah. Very difficult. Impossible."

Have they called you a commie-loving traitor yet in America? "No." Will it bother you if they do? "No, it doesn't bother me. I don't have any control over that. I don't read your articles, I don't read your interviews. I don't want to read what you say."

Look, I say, I'm not calling you a commie-loving traitor. "Yeah!" he says sarcastically. "Boom! Woooo! Yeah. Cut to 'Voom! Weooooo!!' "Which, I think, roughly translates as, "You say you won't call me a commie-loving traitor, but come the article, who knows what you will call me?"

"Yeah, who cares? Y'know I believe in God! You can't call me a communist. I believe in God and I also believe in man."

I ask about his life. He tells me he has no children, but there are two tortoises and two big dogs - an Australian shepherd and a St Bernard - who will happily take chunks out of me if I ask any more personal questions. Fair enough, but I'm still thinking about his early years in Puerto Rico, a self-governing US territory in the north-eastern Caribbean, and wondering whether it was this period that politicised him. After all, the archipelago, which was invaded by the Americans in 1898 in the Spanish-American war, has been famously used and abused by the US. I mention the island of Vieques - where the US navy tested weapons, including depleted uranium, and the cancer rate shot up - and ask Del Toro if his desire to expose American intolerance of other political cultures goes back to this, or whether I am way off the mark. He smiles, and says that Vieques is a place of great significance for him. "No, no, no, no, you're, like, right in the bullseye. Pretty close in there. Definitely. Definitely. And there were people who went down there - not just Puerto Ricans - and opposed it. I actually met Robert Kennedy Jr, who went down there and got arrested with [actor and director] Edward James Olmos, and at some point I was in Puerto Rico when they were in jail and I went to visit them with my dad, so yeah, there is a political thing. It's a beautiful island."

The thing is, Del Toro says, at heart he is an optimist. And you see bad things, and it just reminds you of the capacity for good and change. We meet a few weeks before the US election, and I ask how he'll vote, and he asks if I'm joking. Sure, Bush has been awful, but now there's the prospect of Obama. OK, America can be intolerant, but at least he is allowed to make a movie about Che Guevara. And yes, Vieques was shocking, but it united people in protest that led to the US navy leaving. "So just move ahead, keep going, everything is going to work out." He pauses. "There is a saying in Spanish that goes, 'No hay mal que...' Give me the pen, I'll write it down myself - 'No hay mal que por bien no venga.' I can't really translate it." Try, I say. "OK - even out of the worst thing, good things can come, basically. I don't know where that came from, I don't know why I said that, but yeah."

Benicio del Toro tells Alex von Tunzelmann how he felt the weight of historical responsibility when playing the Latin American revolutionary in Steven Soderbergh's biopic, and why everyone needs to see Che: Part Two